Xi’an villagers steal chickens from crashed delivery truck

(From CRI) Three trucks crashed into each other on a highway of Xi’an City, resulting in two people injured and many chickens dead. The car wreck took place on Sept. 26th due to too much fog. The most damaged truck was delivering thousands of chickens, some of them got out from the cages and ran about on the highway. Villagers nearby came over the help, but some were only helping themselves out by secretly taking chickens home.

I think most of the chickens would be dead anyway by the time a new truck could arrive and get them transferred. And it’s not like the lone driver had a place to keep the chickens whose crates had broken. Might as well let people have them. If the driver was more empowered he could have thought of this and sold hunting rights for a minor sum just so it wouldn’t be a total loss for the company.

Imagine it was a truck load of coke that crashed somewhere near Washington DC. Actually, make it a truckload of canned beer. I’d be shocked if no one stopped to pick a few up. People, human beings like free stuff.

I’m pretty sure China doesn’t have laws regarding this but in Europe all the surviving chickens (or any other kinds of foodstuff) would have to be destroyed anyway after an event like that hence the owner wouldn’t lose any more money if people helped themselves to some. When I was a kid a huge lorry filled with soda cans slid down the embankment near my house. Nobody got hurt but for a 9 year old it was like the second coming of Jeebus. There were cans of coke, Fanta and 7up EVERYWHERE and the police at the scene -knowing that this was already just an insurance matter- let us pick up as many as we could carry from the ground. It’s still one of my fondest childhood memories, 100 kids having the time of their life stuffing cans into their clothes with enormous smiles on their faces. I suspect the police and the driver were just happy that they didn’t have to clean up the mess.

“there was the flow of tears from men because of the wasted sweet nectar”

The only time Americans have acted like fools is when a bank robber drove down the freeways throwing out cash. The idea that men would cry in the USA over spilled beer is absurd. Your flower language about beer calling it sweet nectar tells me you have never been to America, and perhaps have never had beer!

There are several fruit infused beers that are sweet: raspberry and pear, or cherry flavored beers are fairly common. However, I would agree Americans have no reason to cry over their average beer.
If memory serves me well, they did act like fools during the 1992 LA riots. Widespread looting is anything but a chinese invention.

The L.A. riot was related to a police beating. I was there when a mob tried to burn down L.A. city hall so I know, and I also watched the police encourage looting and mayhem in certain sections of the city because it suited their agenda after beating a man on video. When I used the word “fool” I meant excited as in foolery. The looters I saw in L.A. never really were that excited, bored would be a better description.

I don’t think this is a ‘so what?’ news item at all. It’s very revealing. Perhaps it merely illustrates something which we already know, but from time to time it is worth reminding ourselves that the reaction of bystanders to incidents such as this demonstrate a fundamental reality about a culture, beyond any trumpeted progress that the Government may like to portray.

To those farmers walking off with the chickens, I’m sure it was a ‘so what?’ moment for them – in all honesty they probably wouldn’t even have considered it to be ‘theft’. We must remember that European norms about respect of property and rule of law are not necessarily ‘normal’ in all other cultures around the world. In the US, for example, the moment there’s a city-wide blackout, pretty much all the citizenry goes out looting. As for the ancient treasures that US troops looted from Iraq… well, while thousands of cultural artefacts have been recovered, tens of thousands more will probably never be repatriated.

The ‘so what?’ attitude of the chicken thief is much the same as that of the New York looter (and of those who condone such crimes of opportunity). To a Western European mind, the value of the item being stolen is largely immaterial to fact, whilst the circumstances of the event may serve only in mitigating arguements. To the minds of people in certain other cultures, however, the circumstances of the opportunity dictate the degree of moral acceptability, and the value of an item may dictate whether the theft is considered a crime at all.

This happens in western countries as well. What if cash fell off at the back of a armored truck, people will flood to the streets to pick up the free cash.

In this case, poverty is the cause. I’m not condoning it for the poor to steal. But you got to understand these villagers will be opportunistic just like when there is was a tropical storm in a US city not long ago and looters flogged shops damaged by the floods.

This happened in the town I grew up in in the UK; a truck carrying Fruittella (small chewy sweets a bit like Opal Fruits or Starburst or Chewits) crashed on the highway, and every kid came to school with bags full of the things. Somehow it seems that people the world over feel it is not stealing if the stuff is lying around on the ground.